Why Roof Jobs Go Wrong: The $5,000 Communication Gap

Every busy roof job has 50 tiny things that can go wrong. Wrong colors, dumpster disasters, long lead skylights. That's why we built the job file playbook, a simple process that enforces your sales guys to capture every critical detail before work starts and the results. No surprises, no callbacks, and your crews know exactly what to do.

Why do jobs go wrong? You have the wrong color, put on a roof and don't be ashamed. This stuff happens. It's simply a matter that the sales guy got a text message to his phone where the customer said they wanted to switch colors that didn't make it onto the contract or didn't make it into the CRM. And then the production manager didn't get the notice and so he ordered the color that was on the original agreement or something like that. Or you don't know the gutter color and now you're trying to figure out what gutter color you need. Or you had the wrong vent types order. So originally they had button vents, but you're upgrading the ridge vent, but that upgrade somehow didn't make it to production or you didn't know where to put the dumpster, so you had to call the sales guy to find out where to put the dumpster or your production manager guest put it on the wrong side. Block the customer in their driveway or block the tenant from being able to get out. Mom couldn't get her car out to go, take the kids to school, something like that. Permitting you, you didn't get the permits done. Homeowners associations, you got arguments over color because maybe it wasn't the wrong color, but the customer was allowed to pick a color that their homeowners association didn't allow. Or the husband was a firefighter and they told you you can't come and work between Mondays and Thursdays because they didn't want you to be waking up their husband or the dog needs to go to the kennel. Homeowner didn't wanted you to let them know when you were coming because they wanted to put their dog in a kennel because it has major anxiety. Or maybe he had the wrong skylight size and type, or you didn't get the skylight size and type, or you didn't find out even know that you had a skylight. You go to schedule the roof and now you find out that there's a skyl light, you don't have it in stock and now you have to go back afterwards to do the skylight again. Or they don't know about the upgrades that were sold. So there's some upgrade. You guys were going to do an upgrade to architectural cap or an upgrade to full ice and water or something like that. An upgrade that you didn't know about. Or homeowner and tenant communications. You're communicating with the homeowner, but you didn't communicate with the tenant. And now the tenant has some kind of birthday party going on, or they didn't know to get their vehicles out of the driveway. And now there's this big cluster at the beginning of the job. Or maybe there's certain exclusions that you didn't know about. I witnessed it live when I was at a company where they were doing a church roof and there was three different bids out there. There was one for the slope roof, one for the flat roof, and one for the slope and flat roof. And it didn't get into company cam that we were excluding the flat roof. And they ripped off the flat roof of this church and they had to completely redo the flat roof for free because they didn't catch that that was being excluded. Or you have promises of the things that you're going to do, like the little extras like a shed that you promised to do. This one, I remember this one happened to us quite a few times, where sales guy would promise to do the shed or some other little outbuilding and extra bundles to kind of get the deal in the end. And like, oh, yeah, we'll do the shed for you. No, no charge. And then the guys would be all packed up. Homeowner would come out and be like, wait, wait, wait. You were supposed to do a shed. Now the roofer's got to completely unpack the truck and get all the stuff out there and go rip off and redo the shed. And everybody's pissed off because they had laborers that were kind of walking around putting one shingle in the dump trailer at a time because they had nothing to do, but they need to look busy. And we were paying hourly, so that was just straight cost. Or you had long lead items that you didn't know about, things that would take a long time to get even, Things like getting solar taken off. You show up at the house and the solar panels are still on, Whereas carpentry work you didn't know about. Now you got to go get water, you're reflashing a chimney, something like that. Or just you had some kind of angry customer because you said you're going to do something. It didn't get done. The homeowner says, well, we told the guy. We told the guy that we Told him that all of these things, all of this is sourced in the fact that the sales guy is out on the roof and he does his thing, and then the production manager gets a file and he has no idea what the heck he's supposed to do. And the whole goal is to try and make it so that we have this perfect handoff between sales and the production manager so that we know exact. So that once this handoff happens, it's the production manager's football and we got to try and find a way to make it so it's almost robotic in nature that the production manager doesn't have to think about what the customer might want. They're just doing what they're told. And there's a process in which we use to accomplish this called a job file playbook. And it's just the digital version of what a lot of companies used to do. But we need a way to kind of make it so that it's always false over. So when a contract is signed in a deal, and this is just a brand new account that we're building, if we bring a project to project sold, it's going to prompt us for some things. But it can't qualify for review yet. Right? Because once the contract is signed, we have to get it so it's officially sold, and then it can get approved and move into production. In order to move it from contract signed to project sold, it has to say, qualifies for review. Right? Because then the sales manager reviews it and approves it. Well, how do they get it to move into project sold? We have this job file playbook. And a playbook is a HubSpot feature that allows you to ask questions and they require answers. So you see these ones in red, they require answers. So you can jump to any particular place. And so what'll do is say, okay, are there any hot buttons? What is the most important job detail? So we can say there is a rose bush along the back of the house. Her grandmother gave her the rose bush, and it was given to her by Elvis. If we wreck this bush, she said, it would be like killing grandma twice. Now, that's a text property. It's unstructured data. But then there's also structured data like, can we build a deposit? It's like, yes or no? We cannot build a deposit. Or we've received the deposit already. So if I say no, cannot build a deposit, we're saying financing deal. So we can't bill a deposit. Now, before we move on to what we should be doing in this Job. Is there any exclusions? So again, it updates a property called roof exclusions. So this is saying that we are not doing the metal overhangs over the doors and windows. Copper, very expensive. Then we're going to say, okay, does the customer have any out of the ordinary request that production should know about? And we can say, okay, customer's husband is firefighter. He works nights Monday to Wednesday. Please schedule Thursday to Saturday. Are we doing the gutters? What are we doing with the gutters? Okay, we are cleaning and leaving them. We're going to put replace. This deal also has a gutter replacement. Is there any skylights? Yes, we're installing new skylights. Right. We can put in here. It's a 60 by 24. Has the customer been informed? No, not informed. That is production's problem. That's the wrong answer. No longer lead items or yes, customer informed. So, yes, this is a custom skylight that we're doing the 60 by 24. It's a long lead item and we've notified the customer that that will take some time. So this isn't going to get scheduled next in three days because we have to wait for this custom skylight. What type of ventilation is being sold? Ridge vent upgrade. Is there a satellite dish? What are we doing with it? Yes, we're replacing it back in the place that it was. So we're putting it back up. What is the scope of work here? It's a roof replacement. What is the color? We'll put that color. Is there a second material type? We're saying no secondary and so therefore there's no secondary color. How many roof squares? 35. Is this deal value accurate? Yes, it is. Now we can log the. See, the save button popped up. So now we log this note. This means that now when we go into this deal, we can see this job file playbook and we can see all the different answers that were put in here. Now if I go back to my deals, if I want to sign this over to project Sold, you'll see now this moved to yes. So the salespeople cannot move it into project Sold unless they fill out their playbook correctly. Because we can say this has to be either known, so the empty box has to have something in it, or we can say the empty box has to say this specific thing. That's why we have these dropdown variables. So then only then when it is in project sold, does the sales manager review it. Because me, if I'm a sales manager and I got seven deals getting signed today, I don't want to look at this until I know that the salesperson has filled out the playbook properly. So I don't review these ones. I only review these ones in Project Sold. And then the sales manager is the ballast to make sure that anything that gets handed to production met his standard. The company standard, not the salesperson standard. So then they come in and review this and make sure that this makes sense.